Robert Plant rejects Alison Krauss's plan for a Daft Punk-inspired album

Robert Plant has rejected Alison Krauss's suggestion that they collaborate for an album inspired by Daft Punk. Although Plant and Krauss are hoping to record a follow-up to 2007's Raising Sand, it's not clear that the two singers are on the same page for their second collaboration.

"Alison called me six weeks ago," Plant recently revealed to Rolling Stone. "She said, 'Should we make a new record? ... We've got to do it like Daft Punk.' I said, 'Alison, get a clue.'"

Plant seems to have dismissed the Daft Punk idea on principle. "Daft Punk? We can go out for dinner with Nile Rodgers, but that's about it," he said. But the main problem is that he doesn't want to get together with Krauss until they've written some "really pretty songs" to sing. The last time they tried to make an LP, in 2009, a lack of good material forced them to to "walk away".

"[Producer Daniel Lanois] and I wrote about five songs in two or three days up in Silver Lake," Plant recalled. "They were pretty good, but they didn't really lend themselves to a vocal collaboration, so I took them away."

Plant eventually released an album with his group Band of Joy and later formed another band, the Sensational Space Shifters. As he puts it, Krauss "went back to the fat guys with beards" - her bluegrass group Union Station - "and she made a pretty good record within that genre".

Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters are now preparing to release their first studio LP, with Nonesuch. Recorded at Peter Gabriel's Real World studios, it features longtime collaborators John Baggott, Billy Fuller and Justin Adams, as well as Gambian ritti-player Juldeh Camara. "It's really a celebratory record, but it’s very crunchy and gritty, very West African and very Massive Attack-y," Plant said. "I'm singing and wailing on top of everything."

Raising Sand, which reached No 2 on the UK and US charts, was nominated for the Mercury prize and won the 2009 Grammy for album of the year.